{{Short description|Origin of the place-name Manhattan}}'''"Manhattan"''', first entering the colonial record in 1609, is one of the oldest indigenous place names still extant in the United States. Manhattan bears a particularly prominent toponym as the island on which New York City was founded, and a metonym for the city's power and influence. Its exact etymology is uncertain, but undoubtedly has its roots in the Munsee language of Lenapehoking. Possible meanings include that it is derived from the Lenape term for "island" itself or of some modified phrase, or that pars pro toto it originally referred only to the island's southern point, named after a hickory grove there. It was also sometimes in the past been attributed as an ethnonym of a local Lenape group, but this is almost certainly mistaken.{{DISPLAYTITLE:Etymology of ''Manhattan''}} [[File:Stad Amsterdam in Nieuw Nederland (City Amsterdam in New Netherland) Castello Plan 1660.jpg|thumb|300px|The ''Manhattoes'' was the area at the very southern tip of the island which grew into New Amsterdam, and subsequently the New York City borough of Manhattan, at the birthplace of New York City (c. 1624).]]
Manhattoe/Manhattoes is a term describing a place and, mistakenly, a people. The location was the very southern tip of the Manhattan island during the time of the Dutch colonization of the Americas at what became New Amsterdam there. The people were a band of the Wappinger known as the Weckquaesgeek, native to an area further north in what is now Westchester County, who controlled the upper three-quarters of the island as a hunting ground.
As was common practice early in the days of European settlement of North America, a people came to be associated with a place, with its name displacing theirs among the settlers and those associated with them, such as explorers, mapmakers, trading company superiors who sponsored many of the early settlements, and officials in the settlers' mother country in Europe.
Because of this early conflation there is enduring confusion over whether "Manhattoe/Manhattoes" were a ''people'' or a ''place''. There is certainty it was a place, at the very tip of Manhattan Island, so referred to by the Dutch,<ref name=letter>[https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/files/5913/8016/5529/Correspondence_1647-1653.pdf Letter from Stephen Goodyear to Peter Stuyvesant, 19 July, 1652] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210921112849/https://www.newnetherlandinstitute.org/files/5913/8016/5529/Correspondence_1647-1653.pdf |date=2021-09-21 }}, addressed to him at "The Manhattoes", ''Correspondence 1647-1653'', Charles Gehring, The New Netherlands Institute, p. 189</ref><ref name=martucci>[https://nava.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/icv24martucci.pdf ''The Standards of the Manhattoes, Pavonia, and Hell-Gate''], David B. Martucci, 2011, p. 786</ref> who evidently inherited the Native American name for the spot they chose to place their settlement (rather than named it after a people already living there, as the island was not permanently inhabited at the time of their 1609 arrival nor Peter Minuit's subsequent purchase of it from the Canarse Indians<ref name=nb/> for 60 guilders in 1626).
Period accounts maintain that Manhattan island was used as a hunting ground by two tribes, the Canarse (Canarsee, or Canarsie) of today's Brooklyn at its southern one-quarter and the Weckquaesgeek the rest, each having no more than temporary camps for hunting parties.
==Morphology== From ''Manna-hata'', as written in the 1609 logbook of Robert Juet, an officer on Henry Hudson's ship ''Halve Maen'' (Half Moon), published in the English travelogue collection of Samuel Purchas.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Robert Juet's Journal of Hudson's 1609 Voyage |url=https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/documents/robert-juet-s-journal-of-hudson-s-1609-voyage |access-date=2025-01-24 |website=www.nytimes.com}}</ref> The Velasco Map, dated 1610, depicts the name doubleted, ''Manahata'' on the west side, and ''Manahatin'' on the east side of the Mauritius River (later named the Hudson River),<ref name=":0" /> though its authenticity has been questioned.<ref>{{Cite web |title=NYC 99 – an Historical Atlas of New York City |url=http://www.nyc99.org/1600/velasco.html |access-date=2025-01-24 |website=www.nyc99.org}}</ref> This plurality appears in many colonial Dutch writings, which often refer to "the Manhattans" or similar.
Scholarship generally supports one of two possible meanings for ''Manna-hata'' — either a variation on the Lenape term for "island" (similar to Manhasset, New York on Long Island), or to the Lenape term designating the southernmost point of the island, said to have been the site of hickory trees.
The word "Manhattan" has been translated as ''island of many hills''.<ref name="Mannahatta">Holloway, Marguerite. [https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802E1D71F3CF935A25756C0A9629C8B63 "Urban tactics; I'll Take Mannahatta"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081217020449/http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802E1D71F3CF935A25756C0A9629C8B63 |date=17 December 2008 }}, ''The New York Times''</ref> ''The Encyclopedia of New York City'' offers other derivations, including from the Munsee dialect of Lenape: ''manahachtanienk'' ("place of general inebriation"), ''manahatouh'' ("place where timber is procured for bows and arrows"), or ''menatay'' ("island").<ref>[http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkyNjcmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTMxODU3MzImeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk5 "More on the names behind the roads we ride"] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070807051845/http://www.northjersey.com/page.php?qstr=eXJpcnk3ZjczN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXkyNjcmZmdiZWw3Zjd2cWVlRUV5eTMxODU3MzImeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk5 |date=7 August 2007 }}, ''The Record (Bergen County)'', 21 April 2002. Retrieved 26 October 2007.</ref>
The name ''Manhattan'' most likely originated, via loaning by Dutch, from the Lenape's local language Munsee, ''manaháhtaan'' (where ''manah-'' means "gather", ''-aht-'' means "bow", and ''-aan'' is an abstract element used to form verb stems). The Lenape word has been translated as "the place where we get bows" or "place for gathering the (wood to make) bows". According to a Munsee tradition recorded by Albert Seqaqkind Anthony in the 19th century, the island was named so for a grove of hickory trees at its southern end that was considered ideal for the making of bows. An alternate theory claims a "Delaware source akin to Munsee ''munahan'' ("island")."<ref name=":0">{{Cite journal|last=Goddard|first=Ives|author-link=Ives Goddard|date=2010|title=The Origin and Meaning of the Name "Manhattan"|url=http://repository.si.edu/xmlui/handle/10088/16790|journal=New York History|volume=91|issue=4|pages=277–293|hdl=10088/16790|issn=0146-437X|via=Smithsonian Research Online}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://www.etymonline.com/word/Manhattan#etymonline_v_6797 |title=Manhattan |website=Online Etymology Dictionary |author=Douglas Harper |date=2023 |access-date=December 30, 2024 }}</ref> Nora Thompson Dean (Touching Leaves Woman) defined it as: 'place that is an island', from Lenape {{transliteration|del|Menating}}.<ref name="Kraft, Herbert C. 1985 p. 45">Kraft, Herbert C.; Kraft, John T. (1985). The Indians of Lenapehoking (First ed.). South Orange, NJ: Seton Hall University Press. p. 45. {{ISBN|0-935137-00-9}}</ref> The common poetic rendering in American verse is "Mannahatta", originating perhaps in Washington Irving's Knickerbocker's History (with one "t") and popularized by Walt Whitman (with two "t"s). {{wikisource-multi|Knickerbocker's History of New York/Book II/Chapter VI|t1=Washington Irving|Leaves of Grass (1860)/Mannahatta|t2=Walt Whitman}}
==Toponym/ethnonym== ===Manhattoes/Manhattans (place)=== [[File:Fort New Amsterdam on the Manhatans (New York) print c1626.jpg|thumb|300px|The "earliest depiction of Manhattan" (c.1626) shows Fort Amsterdam on what it calls the "Manhatans" on the very southern tip of today's Manhattan island]]
'''Manhattoes''' was the name of a Dutch settlement in New Netherlands in the early decades of their settlement there in the 1600s.<ref name=letter/><ref name=martucci/> Located at the very southern tip of today's Manhattan Island, it was known by the native term by both the Dutch and the English who wished to displace them.<ref>[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/13811/13811.txt ''Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam''], John S. C. Abbott, 2004. "The next morning, which was Saturday, Colonel Nicholls sent a delegation of four men up to Fort Amsterdam, with a summons for the surrender of "the town situated on the island commonly known by the name of Manhattoes, with all the forts thereunto belonging."</ref> Fort Nieuw Amsterdam was built in 1627, but the common name held fast. Eventually, by the time of the incorporation of the settlement, the fort's name displaced the original, and "Manhattoes" became Nieuw Amsterdam in 1653.<ref name=martucci/>
The original southernmost tip of Manhattan corresponds approximately to the modern Peter Minuit Plaza.
The terms '''Manhattans''' and '''Manhatans''' were also used for the Manhattoes by some Dutch, giving rise to Manhattan island's contemporary name and conflation with a people (the Wecquaeskgeek) who neither occupied that part of the island nor went by that name. {{-}}
===Manhattoe/Manhattan (people)=== thumb|300px |This 1685 revision of a 1656 map erroneously indicates "Wickquaskeck" in Westchester County above Manhattan island and "Manhattans" on it
'''Manhattoe''', also '''Manhattan''', was a name erroneously given to a Native American people of the lower Hudson River, the Weckquaesgeek,{{efn|Writer Nathaniel Benchley argues that the Dutch simply found it easier to refer to the natives as "Manhattans" rather than Weckquaesgeek.<ref name=nb>[http://www.americanheritage.com/24-swindle "The $24 Swindle"], Nathaniel Benchley, ''American Heritage'', 1959, Vol 11, Issue 1</ref>}} a Wappinger band which occupied the southwestern part of today's Westchester County.<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=--1cDwAAQBAJ&dq=manhattoe++irving+wolfert+fireside&pg=PA19 "He sits by his fireside in the ancient city of the Manhattoes...,"] ''Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies'', Washington Irving, p. 19</ref>{{efn|They were, along with the Tappans, Raritan, and other Wappinger bands along the Hudson, known as the "River Indians".<ref>[Indian Tribes of Hudson's River]; Ruttenber, E.M.; Hope Farm Press, 3rd ed, 2001, {{ISBN|0-910746-98-2}}</ref>}} In the early days of Dutch settlement they utilized the upper three-quarters of Manhattan Island<ref>[https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/05/archives/melville-depicted-city-of-manhattoes-lured-by-the-sea.html Moby Dick, Herman Melville, Chapter 1], reprinted in "Melville Depicted City of ‘Manhattoes’ Lured by the Sea,", ''New York Times'', July 5, 1976, p. 13</ref><ref>[http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/cul/texts/ldpd_6202415_001/ldpd_6202415_001.pdf "Brooks, ponds, swamps, and marshes characterized other portions of the island of the 'Manhattoes'"], ''The Memorial History of the City of New York,'' James Grant Wilson, New York, 1892</ref> as a hunting grounds.
The people – Wecquaesgeek – became conflated with a place - the Manhattoes, regardless that it was the only part of the island they did not occupy. Over time that term became "Manhattan" and "Manhattans" for those who hunted the vast majority of the island, as well as the name of the island.
Contrastingly, the name "Manhattans" was also applied in a 1652 colonial document to the people of the Nyack Tract in Brooklyn, and their leader is named as "Mattano". Nyack people were Canarsee, and may have been connected to southern Manhattan Island. {{-}}
==Notes== {{notelist}}
==References== {{reflist}}
==See also== * Metoac
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Etymology Of London}} Category:Algonquian ethnonyms Category:Algonquian peoples Category:Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands Category:Native American history of New York (state) Category:Native American tribes in New York (state) Category:People from New Netherland Manhattan Category:The Battery (Manhattan)